Constitutional Reforms

Restrict the franchise

We don't have universal suffrage, and no-one is advocating it. Therefore there's a choice that has to be made, and a legitimate question is Who should vote?

I believe that people who derive their main form of income from the state (yes, including teachers) should not be given the vote. Either we accept the libertarian position of state as monster, or we treat it as a consensual collective that generates welfare-enhancing policy. In which case the relationship between customer and employee needs to be refined:

Ford employees shouldn't determine Ford's production levels: they should participate in developing efficient responses to consumer-defined production

A Clarke Tax

Might a Clarke Tax be used as an effective "preference-revealer"? According to Zhaofeng Xue:

Clarke tax is a voting system where everyone
express their preference in form of money amount and only the voter
whose money amount changes the voting result ... pays.

voters might collude and over express their
preference. So doing would make any single member of the colluding
group free from paying the clarke tax -- since his voting does not
change the result, while the aggregate effect of the vote of the
entire group does change the result.

Does this fear hold up though?

Method of Marks

Popularised (and dismissed) by famous political scientist Charles Dodgeson (aka Lewis Carroll), the Method of Marks is a simple way to demonstrate the weight of a preference ordering.

Voters are given a "budget" of votes to distribute between the candidates as they wish.

The only criticism of this seems to be that it's undermined by strategic voting (in a similar way to a Clarke Tax being undermined by possible collusion), but as James Buchanan (rightly) says "All voting is Strategic".pdf

Set up Government for tender

I believe that Buchanan and Wagner fundamentally undermined the Keynesian justification for fiscal policy:

at the margin politicians preferred easy choices to hard ones, and this
meant lower taxes and higher spending. Thus, whatever the merits of
Keynesian economics in using government fiscal policy to "balance" the
forces of inflation and deflation and employment and unemployment in an
economy, its application in a democratic setting had severe problems of
incentive compatibility; that is, there was a bias toward deficit
finance

In short the elementary insights of Public Choice demonstrate how deficits are an inevitable consequence of the incentive structures generated by democratic control of the public purse. But there is an institutional arrangement that deals with this problem - tenders. The Labour party has "acute cash flow problems" and the Conservatives are also effectively bankrupt. Neither party have demonstrated sensible in house financial management, and to permit them to control the Treasury is ludicrous. So why not force political parties to submit spending plans prior to an election, and make them cover shortfalls or miscalcultions from their own party funds?

...and finally

It's no coincidence that I've linked to so many Political Scientists associated with GMU, and the person with the deepest originality and innovation in this field will follow suit.

UPDATE: Thanks to all those who've commented on this, although I'm disappointed the main focus has been on the restriciton of the franchise. The response actually undermines the possibility of having a rational debate on constitutionalism, which is a shame. People seem unwilling to run the thought experiment, dismissing it out of hand. Fair play to Jim though, who makes an interesting point: Anthony's blog suggests an ever-larger state and an ever-smaller electorate.

Yup, no votes for schoolteachers nor for those living on "benefits". Also, no votes for anyone under, say, 35 - we start life drawing wealth from parents and state and only in our mid-thirties (I guess) do we become net payers. How about no votes for those whose life expectancy lies this side of the next general Election? Probably not worth the fuss. But useful though reform of the franchise is, it's not enough. A bit of Reaction is probably required: how about zero pay for MPs? I'd suggest a written constitution to restrict government, but the US one does such a poor job that I'm none too sure.

"I believe that people who derive their main form of income from the state (yes, including teachers) should not be given the vote."

Banning people who derive income from the state from voting is like banning people who derive income from Ford from buying a Ford.

And quite apart from that, I think you're missing an obvious potential for strategic abuse of such a 'system', as one set of voters could elect a government which promised to nationalise - and thus disenfranchise the employees of - a particular sector. Sounds like a recipe for an ever-expanding state and an ever-decreasing electorate - The Road to Serfdom indeed!

Incidentally, I presume your definition of someone who derives income from the state includes anyone who sells their services to the state, such as management consultants, taxi-drivers and toilet cleaners?

I advocate the separation of powers of spending (=legislation) and taxation by constituting two separately-elected legislature - one to legislate, and one to tax.

The legislature would function pretty much like the House of Commons, but without the power to tax. That power would pass to a taxing chamber whose job it is to raise tax at the Commons' request to cover necessary expenditure engendered by legislation. Taxing chamber members would run on their taxation promises alone, and legislators would lack the power themselves to raise taxes to cover any election promises; they would need to persuade the taxers of the merits of the legislation before it became law.

So bribe-em-with-their-own-money politics would be very nearly impossible; lobbyists would go extinct; and nobody loses his vote - indeed everybody now has two votes. Call it Double Democracy.

"Because someone, eventually, will have to pick up the bill and pay for it."

I mean customer in the sense of someone who is or isn't able to choose their provider. Ford employees can choose who to buy their car from, so why can't state employees help choose who is in government?

"It's like banning Ford employees from forcing Toyota customers to also buy a Ford."

Well the idea with national government is that you just have one at a time, isn't it? If you don't like that idea, you should really say so up front. And of course if people don't like the government in their area they can always leave - nobody's 'forcing' them to stay there. I seem to remember you extolling the virtues of government-less Somalia, for example, so why not try there?

Suddenly you care about empirical likelihood? How empirically likely is it that anyone who gets income from the government will vote to disenfranchise themselves? Or was the idea that a select group of free-market economists (obviously not government employed) would seize power and rule with a benevolent omniscience instead?